


Amazing Grace

by AshVee



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Civil War, Disillusioned Captain America, F/M, Genocide, Hand-Wavey Original Character, Language, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Multi, Violence, time travel fic, warfare
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 10:53:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13950063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: Amazing Grace,How sour your soundThat damned a wreckage like me.I once was lostbut still I'm not found;had sight,Now I can't see.-Chase Holfelder





	1. A Family, Burned

**Author's Note:**

> AN: Ok. So. I don’t normally start pieces one way and then completely re-write the whole damned thing because of outside influences, but… This was originally a very dark piece (it’s still a very dark piece) centering around Tony, Bucky, and Clint (it still does, mostly). But, then I heard this haunting version of the National Anthem in minor key and got this soul-rotting post-national-fallout bug with a disillusioned Captain America and the fall of a nation and… It just ran away from me, okay? 
> 
> Also - While not the a main character, this piece involves the use of an original character - which means it might not be your cup of tea. They’re only in like two chapters, but if that’s not your thing? That’s alright. I don’t like mpreg. We all have our squick points. So, my sandbox, my rules. Stay and play; I promise I picked out the cat shit.

Clint Barton stared at the burned out wreckage of his everything. 

His barn. His truck. His home. 

The thick smell of smoke and heat filled his nostrils. The fields were still smoldering half a mile down the gravel drive up to the house.

What was left of the house. The charred bones of the home had fallen in on the foundation, leaving the thickest support beams still standing like sentinels screaming hope and casting damnation on his head. Clint picked his way blindly through the mess, eyes only half-searching. His heart was Schroedinger’s Cat. Finding his family was everything, but finding his family meant everything was gone. 

Waiting warred with imagination. Both were worse. Neither was better. 

The bathroom, a centrally located room no more than five by five, still had all four corner pillars, big load bearing things reduced to charred spires. Inside, the toilet had shattered into the subfloor that had fallen between the joists. The bathtub still balanced atop them, half inside the wood and half cradled by debris. 

A blackened skeleton huddled down in the remains of the porcelain. 

_Laura._

His chest seized, something threatening to bubble up his throat or tear its way through his rib cage or both. It stilled, several long minutes later, but the forms huddled around her, wrapped in what was left of her arms…

And this was _his fault._

These were his choices, his stubborn pride. He’d retired. He’d made the difficult decision, and then Captain Rogers had called. Captain America needed him, needed him, and he had gone. The Raft, the bombings, the war. There were chances of leaving again, chances he hadn’t taken because he’d felt responsible for Wanda, for the team, for everything that had fallen apart. He’d been so caught up in guilt he’d ignored everything that was being a husband, a father. 

The backlash had been quick and violent, and while Clint was in the Raft, the war evolved.

#

_“Stand down, this is a jailbreak. Those who don’t surrender will be shot in the head.” Tony’s voice came through the loudspeaker in the ceiling of the Raft._

_Clint’s eyes snapped open, staring at the white-lit tile. A moment later, an alarm sounded, and the door was blasted off its hinges. Two suits flew in, one after the other, lapping the room and taking down two guards on the opposite end in a glint of dull grey and flat black metal._

_In the next moment, Tony Stark - not Iron Man - walked through the blown open door. It should have been a sign things had changed, the world had changed, but Clint was a narrow minded man. He was an arrow, pointed in a direction, with only one way to go. The only reason he was willing to listen in those first few minutes was that it was just Tony - Tony who played Mario Kart and made him trick arrows and drank him under the table - that walked through the door in a show of shock and awe._

_“Didn’t see this one coming, Futurist,” Clint shouted, lolling his head off the end of his cot. Tony stood there in jeans and a t-shirt, tattered and torn, and he snapped such a glare at Clint that the archer rolled off the cot to his feet._

_Tony muttered something into a comm unit. The Iron Man suits responded, burning the air as they melted down the hinges of their cells. Falcon was the first out, stepping uneasily into the central hub of their prison amid the smell of burned metal and slag._

_“Stark,” he said, “You take care of Cap?”_

_Wasn’t that a question, nearly a year later? Clint hadn’t seen Captain America or the Winter Soldier marched through their cell block. For all Clint knew, they were still running, still fighting. Or dead. They could have been dead._

_The dark scowl on Tony’s face was almost impressive. It didn’t stop Clint from sashaying toward him._

_“Come to break up our slumber party?” Clint asked. “I’m not even enhanced, and they stuck me in here. I’m just a retiree, and because of you-”_

_“Because of me?” Tony snapped, turning toward him._

_With Stark facing him, Clint could see the heavy bruising to the right side of his face, running from his temple to the delicate flesh of his neck, beneath his beard and back toward his spine. There was a cut there, sutured shut but running the length between cheekbone and jaw. It would make an impressive scar. More frightening was the fatigue in every line of him._

_Stark always looked stretched thin, too many balls in the air at once, but this was a bone-deep weariness Clint hadn’t seen before._

_Stark gestured widely toward the rest of the containment unit, and the shirt drew thin over his chest. The ratty thing was thread-bare, and Clint could almost make out a dull blue glow from beneath it. In a moment, it was gone, and Clint was again distracted by the sallowness of his skin, the anger in his words._

_“Because of me? Because of me, Barton, you won’t be in this thing when it sinks into the Atlantic. Because of me, the-” He bit off his own words and gestured toward the suit. The two flew out the door they’d blown down. “Stay here and drown or shut up and come with me.”_

_Stark was halfway to the door when the far guard-room door exploded open._

_“Hands in the air!” a woman shouted. Her uniform did nothing to hide how pretty she was, how soft her face and shoulders were._

_“Hands!” a man shouted, following her out the door. He was strong jawed, thick corded muscle straining at the collar of his shirt and the hem of his sleeve. Clint had often thrown steroid questions at him through his glass door._

_In the breadth of turning his head, Stark drew a small gun from his hip and clipped off two rounds. The bodies hit the tile within moments of each other. Even from the distance, Clint could see the oozing bullet holes in their faces, just left of center, where the nose met the eye._

_“Jesus,” Scott said, stumbling out of his prison cell and stepping over Strong-Jaw’s leg. “That was a little uncalled for.”_

_“It really wasn’t,” Tony said, turning his back on them._

_Clint watched him go for a moment, shocked. Tony Stark wasn’t a marksman. He didn’t shoot guns. He certainly didn’t know the facial bones were thinnest just where he’d shot, didn’t know it was a sniper’s target. Clint set his jaw and helped Wanda from her straight jacket. Stark was back through the doors by the time Clint jogged after him._

_The destruction the suits had wrought on the way in was impressive, even to someone like Clint who could, as he’d proven, bring down a helicarrier. There were bodies every few feet, some downed by bullets, others with cauterized repulsor burns through their chests. The smell of burning flesh hung thick in the nostrils, stagnant and almost sweet._

_Clint side stepped a melted pile of something at the last minute - it was best not to think on what had caused the gelatinous mess._

_The helicopter waiting in the hangar bay on the top floor had none of the luxurious design Clint associated with Stark Industries. There was no chrome, no red and gold flash or extra-wide leather seats. It wasn’t the subtle strength of the Quinjet. No hidden guns or sleek politically correct firing panels._

_It was shockingly militant, designed to intimidate, even from a distance. Flat black and grey, the bright red “A” painted on the tail rudder stood out in sharp contrast. Large, rolling guns were mounted on either side of the cockpit. Self targeting missiles lined the space between the landing gear. Clint eyed a beautiful little cannon at the rear that reminded him of Stark’s repulsors._

_“This...looks more than a little uncalled for,” Lang said, voice awed. Clint didn’t bother waiting for Stark’s answer. He climbed into the pilot’s seat, running his hands over the steering column reverently. She was a beautiful death machine, and he wanted to fly her._

_Stark tapped his hip, gesturing him to the co-pilot’s seat._

_“No way, I’m-”_

_“You can’t fly her,” Tony said, voice sharp. Clint looked down at the controls, the delicate switches and buttons. Like hell he couldn’t. He hadn’t, but he was going to remedy that in the next five minutes. “Biometrics, Barton. It won’t respond to you.”_

_Clint glared down at the little sensors on the steering and by the ignition switch. Petulantly, he flipped it on and off twice before climbing across the center console controls between the two seats._

_“You’re getting me access,” he said as Stark climbed in beside him._

_“For your birthday, if you’re extra good,” Stark promised. He pressed his palm to the panel below the ignition, and in a moment, the entire thing shuttered to life, more quiet than any chopper Clint had ever flown, blades already snick-snickering above them as the rest clamored into the back._

_“Holy Christmas,” Clint muttered. He reached across and trailed a finger along one of the steering sticks. The entire thing shuttered to a quiet halt._

_“Hands off, and we’ll program you in while we fly,” Tony said, restarting her. Clint settled into the co-pilot’s seat. Sam, Lang, and Wanda were huddled together along a canvass bench seat._

_“All in, Stark,” Sam shouted from the back._

_Clint watched the hangar as it started to shake apart around them. A screeching groan echoed through the wide bay, and Stark lurched the chopper to the side. One of the heavy, overhead doors slammed into the ground a few feet away, flattening everything beneath._

_“You waiting on an invitation, man?” Scott asked. His hands gripped the canvas seat beneath him with both hands. His eyes flashed this way and that, occasionally patting the seat, looking for a seatbelt if Clint knew him at all. The other two - Wanda and Sam - were wrapped in a pink hue, keeping them stable in the back._

_Stark ignored him, muttering under his breath so low Clint couldn’t hear him. A few moments later, something exploded deep within the Raft, and the entire thing shifted beneath them, twisting sideways. Stark stayed, hands poised on the steering._

_“About time,” he muttered._

_Clint’s sharp eyes caught movement on the edge of his peripheral vision, and swore under his breath. He was hallucinating; he had to be because the man running pell-mell toward them was, in fact, the Winter Soldier._

_“Come on,” Stark muttered, hands on the steering as the Raft started to shutter apart around them. “Get the door open and scoot over!”_

_Clint reached back, pulling Lang across to the floor behind his seat as Wanda popped the door open with her power. Barnes was running uphill now, the Raft starting to sink and list to the side. Debris skittered along the ground, and he lept out of the way as he ran._

_“He’s not going to make it,” Wanda said simply. Clint had to admit she was right. The entire thing had listed on its side, and water was spilling in at an alarming rate. Items that had been bolted down - a desk, a piece of scaffolding - the Soldier was using as footholds to climb forward. The second door groaned under the weight of the ocean water trying to flood through._

_“Fuck it,” Stark said, pulling the helicopter up and to the side. “FRIDAY, engage autopilot, and do not drop Daddy.”_

_“Stark?” Clint asked, but Tony had already popped his door open. He climbed down onto the landing gear, hanging by his elbows. “Shit, shit, shit.” Clint slid across to the pilot’s seat, taking care not to touch the sensors. The helicopter listed sideways, dangerously close to the ground and the side of the Raft. It was closer than any human pilot would have managed with the structure shuttering around them._

_Clint saw it then, the thought behind the act. Tony’s feet hung a good five feet below the level of the helicopter, giving the Winter Soldier five fewer feet to try to climb. The man took one great, running leap, and grabbed onto Stark’s ankles._

_“Damn it, Klondike, lose some fucking weight!” Stark shouted._

_The helicopter lurched upward, slipping out of the rapidly sinking Raft. Barnes hoisted himself up over Tony, hanging by his metal arm on the landing gear and helping Tony pull himself up into the back. Sam hauled him through the door, and Clint scuttled back over the console as Barnes slipped into the pilot’s seat._

_“Next time, get your frost bitten ass to the rendezvous point on time, Barnes,” Stark groused._

_“If you could pilot worth half a shit, you wouldn’t have to hang out of the chopper like a worm.”_

_“Who’d I learn that little shit show maneuver from? Oh, yeah, you. You want to talk incompetence? Who blew the Raft ahead of schedule?” Tony asked, leaning between the two seats and glaring at Barnes. “What the hell was up with that?” Stark inhaled as if to keep ranting, but fell silent._

_He glared darkly at the blackened bit of skin on the back of Barnes’s neck. The faint smell of burned flesh stung his nose when Clint inhaled deeply._

_"They missed me, Stark," Bucky said firmly when he noticed where Tony was glaring. He ignored the squawking sound Tony made and continued to hover over the sinking Raft. If Clint hadn't lived with Tony, hadn't known all his faces and reactions, he might not have recognized the bone-deep affection for what it was._

_"Christ, it's like watching mom and dad flirt, if mom was Sherlock and dad was Moriarty."_

_"That," Tony snapped, fixing Clint with a glare and a pointed finger. "Was incredibly accurate, and I am completely Sherlock in this scenario." He swiped a alcohol pad over the rapidly healing gunshot burn on Barnes' neck._

_Hovering forty feet over the raft, Barnes watched as the last twenty feet of the death trap sank into the water. His sharp eyes were watching, carefully judging and assessing. Once the entire thing had disappeared and the riotous bubbling had calmed, he turned the helicopter west._

#

_New York City was a graveyard, a silent dead forest, sentinel trees long splintering and discolored. Stark promised them much of the Eastern seaboard was similarly scarred. It had been the ruined earth between two warring parties, the first Red Zone._

_Even Lang was quiet in the back as Barnes piloted the helicopter between the husk of a skyscraper and what Clint through might have once been one of the Freedom Towers. The chopper blades rolled on, and the wreckage slowly gave way to suburbs and towns and wide untouched fields._

_A charred swath of land on the edge of the Midwest that Stark mentioned was the site of a fire fight gone out of control made Clint shift uneasily in his seat. Wayne National Forest burned to the ground sometime six months before Stark broke them out of the Raft._

_Ohio wasn’t far from Illinois, and Illinois meant Chicago. Clint could follow the logic that made Lang twitch in his seat. Hell, Ohio wasn’t far from…_

_“Easy, Legolas,” Stark said, smacking the back of Clint’s head lightly._

_“What?” Clint glanced at the engineer, who was pointedly staring at Clint’s hand. He’d been tapping at his knee with his draw fingers. Maybe Clint was a little twitchy too, and when Clint got twitchy, people noticed._

_“Your wife and kids are safe as houses; yours too, Lang.” Crippling relief washed over Clint._

_“Scooped them up two months ago when things started to get out of hand,” Bucky said. “Steve insisted we get everyone underground, get them protected, keep them sheltered from what we were doing.”_

_“Appreciate it,” Lang offered. “Where are they?”_

_In a breath, Stark was rambling on in a diatribe about underground facilities intended for nuclear fallout and hydroponics and a thousand different things Clint didn’t care about. Laura and the kids were safe, and that? Well, that was everything._

_Everything except being out of prison, as it turned out, everything except being back on a team. He didn’t learn the difference in time. His family would be safe, and he could do what he pleased._

_Clint had never been more wrong._

#

As he knelt by the charred porcelain, his head bowed and his world destroyed, he’d been so completely wrong. 

#

_“Laura!” Clint shouted, following her up a flight of iron stairs toward the heli-pad. The stairwell was lit in red emergency lights, the kind that seemed to make everything in their range glow from within. “Come on, Laura. We talked about this!”_

_He glared at her dark hair as it swung behind her in a pony-tail. It seemed all he’d seen of her lately was the back of her head._

_“No, you talked, Clint! All you ever do is talk, and I’ve listened. I’ve listened for so long.” She turned toward him, reached out with tears in her eyes. Her lashes hung wet and clumped against her dark cheeks, pale from a year underground. “I supported your work with SHIELD. You know I did, but this? This isn’t SHIELD. It isn’t just Avenging anymore, Clint. That was a team, and they needed you to keep them grounded. I know that, but now? I can’t keep living with our children underground. I can’t keep making them refugees or terrorists or —”_

_“It’s not forever, Laur.”_

_“Nathaniel hasn’t known a life above ground. Lila stopped asking when she’s going to get to play outside. You know what she asked me this morning instead? She asked me if we were ever going to see the sun again.” Her hand caressed his cheek, light and loving and so familiar it hurt. He chased the tears on her face away with his finger tips._

_“We can figure something out,” he said. “It’s not safe up there yet, not for anyone. Give me a couple months, just six weeks. I can have something set up by then. I’ll retire—”_

_“You did retire,” Laura said. “You retired, and we were all happy except you. You tried, Clint, I know you did, but I woke up in the middle of the night to find you gone. We thought you were dead for a week. I can’t do that again. The kids can’t live their lives in a hole in the ground while you run around playing hero, never knowing if their father is coming home.”_

_“Then give me some time to set something up. Stark can get us out of the country. We can go—”_

_Her hand fell away from his face, and she blinked the tears forming in her eyes away. She turned away, took the last step up to the door, and cracked it open. Sunlight blinded him._

_“We’ll be at the farm. We’ll be at home. If you show up, it’s for good, Clint.” He caught her silhouette against the sun before the door closed, and he saw the last of Laura. Beautiful, perfect Laura, who was the steel at the core of him. Laura, who could make choices that broke her heart for the well being of their children. Laura, with the sun behind her, hair blowing in helicopter wind, and a look on her face he couldn’t see._

_So much for Hawkeye._

#

It wasn’t a week or two or three. Every time he drummed up the courage, every time he thought they’d be alright without him, every time he stood outside of Coulson’s — and wasn’t that a kick in the spleen? — door, his trigger finger itched. His draw arm ached. 

Laura and the kids were in the middle of nowhere. They’d be safer without him, without something to draw the military down on them. 

It wasn’t a month. In the end it was two months and three days. It had taken Scott’s ex-wife being shot while walking the woods for fallen tree-limbs. She’d pulled through, but only because they’d been sheltering a mutant with healing abilities. It scared Clint enough, and he walked.

Damn everyone. Damn Coulson and Natasha, Stark and Rogers, Barnes and Lang and Sam and Wanda and whoever else wanted to blame him for leaving. He walked out. 

He walked out twelve hours too late. He’d…

Laura had stood in front of him, tears in her eyes, desperate and begging. Cooper, who just wanted to learn to fish, had asked to go home for months. Lila, who missed princess dresses and cows in the pasture, had whined for hours every night. Nathaniel, so small and unaware of the world above, played quietly with toys Stark made out of repurposed materials. 

Clint had stayed. He’d stayed, so they’d left. They’d been taken from him, and he hadn’t even…

“Laura?” he muttered, head braced against the broken side of the bathtub. His voice was thick, his throat tight, almost too tight to get the words out. The smell of charred flesh tickled his gag reflex. “Laura, baby? I’m so sorry.” 

He didn’t know how long he sat there, soul pouring past his lips in shattered apologies in the wind.


	2. A Promise, Broken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The death of a national icon, and the end and beginning of a war.

Bucky didn’t blame the guy, not when he thought about it. He learned first hand that blame fell on the shoulders of the guilty, not the victims in the way. If Bucky wasn’t responsible for all those dead, all those snuffed out by a bullet from a gun placed in his hand? Well, then Clint wasn’t responsible for this. 

Mentally, he knew, but when it came down to it, the grieving spit of emotion in his chest didn’t care where blame lay. The guilty party was dead, torn apart by a rage the world didn’t know existed — Barnes didn’t know existed — deep within his own soul. 

“Bucky.” Natasha’s voice came through the thick metal door muffled and tinny. “Barnes, we’re taking off in ten. You’d better be on that transport. Rogers won’t forgive you if you aren’t there.” 

“Who gives a shit?” he snapped through the door. 

Clint left. Steve died.

#

_“On your six, Cap.” Tony’s voice came through the comm units — and clearly, thank whatever God you believed in for that — warning Steve, and more importantly Bucky, of the three men coming up on him in Kevlar._

_“Got them,” Bucky muttered back, finger at his ear to block the team comm. Stark — Tony, now, really — had reached an agreement with Bucky not a month into their fiasco of a resistance. Someone needed to watch Steve’s backside, and they were both more than happy to do it._

_Private comms had come along not long after._

_“Tell him to wake up; he’s sleeping.” Tony’s voice was laced with concern, as it had been for weeks._

_Steve was more and more difficult by the day, disappearing to unknown locations, coming back with some mutant kid under his arm or a new defector at his back. Their numbers were growing, but at a cost no one was comfortable with._

_Steve had stopped wearing the suit. He’d painted the shield matt black, and he’d stopped answering to Captain anything let alone Captain America._

_“He’s been up for three days,” Bucky said. They’d all been up for three days. Lang’s wife — Maggie — was so touch and go he’d not responded when the proximity alarm went off. Everyone had been running patrols or finding new allies or seeing to the day to day running of the compound since._

_They were stretched too thin._

_Natasha had flown out the day before Maggie caught a bullet. She was in the Everglades, looking for a group of mutants Bucky had written off. The Soldier had hidden in the backwater of Florida on assignment once, but Bucky figured if anyone could find a no-see-em on a cow’s ass, he figured it was Natasha. When the mission had been pitched, she’d done little more than complain about the humidity, flip Bucky the bird for his comment that followed, and disappeared._

_Having her gone was like missing a limb, and yes, he knew what that entailed and yes, he could use the turn of phrase if he wanted._

_It was clear once she’d gone. Natasha’s place was at Steve’s back on the ground. Stark was air support. Barton was look out. Bucky split his time between sniper and ground cover, but with Natasha gone, he’d taken to trying to pull double duty._

_“Jesus—” Stark’s next words had been cut off by the explosion that rocked them all. Bucky found the rocket launching son of a bitch seven seconds later, the weapon still on his shoulder, a smug smile in place. He heard — or didn’t hear — Stark keep from becoming road pizza, though the suit was grounded when Bucky fed the man his own weapon, still hot from firing._

_“Stark okay?” he asked through the team comm. He didn’t wait for an answer, and he carefully ignored the swell of relief at seeing Stark walking toward them, half a dozen yards away._

_“I’m good, Klondike. Just took out the— ,” Stark said into the private comm._

_Bucky saw the Iron Man Suit raise a gauntlet, heard a shout, and just like that, Bucky’s world shifted. Later, he thought he felt it, like an earthquake only under his feet. Bucky turned along the outstretched arm, toward Steve. His face was creased with worry for Stark, but between one step and the next, it melted into pain. His relieved smile choked on his own blood, his lung tissue as it burst forward._

_It had been nearly six months since Bucky Barnes lost the fight to the Winter Soldier. For no other reason than his brain was fucked, he pictured one of those little “X days without accident” signs rolling back to zero. It was with that image and a half-choked sob that he beckoned the Solder forward._

_He came laughing._

#

“Barnes, open the damned door.” 

Bucky wasn’t staring at his reflection in the mirror. He wasn’t. Natasha had gone thirty minutes ago, but he hadn’t heard the Starkjet take off. Barnes had just been…

“Come on, Klondike. I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blast your door down.” The faint whir of a repulsor caught his ear and drew Bucky to the door. He opened it to the dull blue glow of the gauntlet. 

“You know better than to use the arc reactor for that,” Bucky said, but there was no heat to his words. There was no heat to anything he’d done in days. He was the cold of the Russian winter to the core of him. “Leave me alone.” 

“I’m starting to think you’re going to have to make me,” Stark said, pushing into the room. The gauntlet was the only thing he’d attached to the arc reactor, and even that made the blue light flicker angrily. 

“That’s your third reactor this month.” Even as cold and distant as he was, he was hyper aware of the dwindling supply of arc reactors in the lab. 

“Of the two of us, I’m the only one that’s eaten, slept, and showered in the last three days, so it’s my judgement we’ll be using in regards to the reactors.” Tony was snarking, which meant — as Bucky had learned — that seventy-five percent of the words spilling past his lips were lies. Looking at him, Bucky was willing to believe he’d stuck his head under a sink in the last thirty minutes, but the bags under his eyes and the sunken look to him made him call bullshit on the rest. 

“Take the gauntlet off. You’ve only got seventeen of those left.” It was a well guarded secret: Stark’s arc reactor problem. Rhodey knew, Buckey was sure, but everyone else had been kept in the dark. Bucky only knew because he’d been lost and wandered into the lab that first week. 

He’d watched Stark pull a basketball sized piece of flesh colored adhesive off of his chest before the engineer noticed him. 

#

_Stark picked at a bit of something just under his left pectoral, a scab or a bit of adhesive, but as Bucky watched, it pulled up, growing larger and larger until the room was bathed in a blue light that reminded Bucky of summer skies and the blues of the Aegean._

_It was a comforting color, but it wasn’t one that should have come from a human body. The metal cylinder there was shining sporadically, plunging them into near darkness before lighting up again. The dull energy conservative lighting that seemed to come from the very walls was just enough to see by, but it paled in comparison to the glow of the thing in Stark’s chest. It was only when the engineer had it removed that Bucky stepped forward._

_“What is that?” he asked. Stark jolted, standing and snapping a thin wire connecting the cylinder to something internal._

_“Son of a bitch,” Stark said, bland and matter of fact. He blinked at Bucky a moment in indignation before scrabbling for more wire in a desk drawer. Deft fingers became slower, more sluggish with each passing second, and it took an embarrassingly long time for Bucky to realize something was wrong._

_“What do you need?” he asked, flesh hand on Stark’s shoulder, the other opening drawers — the other that was made in this exact lab._

_“Get out,” Stark said on the end of a breath. His fingers fumbled a piece of wire, so Bucky captured it, brought it up in front of the engineer’s eyes, and shook him._

_“Tell me what to do,” he said. Stark looked half-exasperated and half-choked, but he nodded._

_“Replace the one at the reactor base. Carefully.” Bucky did as instructed until he was left with nearly a foot and a half of loose wire and a genius with a pair of long pick-ups. “There’s a…” Stark gestured at his chest, eyes sagging._

_“There’s a what?”_

_“Magnet. Change the wire.” Stark didn’t open his eyes, and the color of his skin had paled._

_Bucky was not proud of how long it took him to get the magnet out and replace the wire. He wasn’t proud of not realizing Stark had passed out or of how long it took him to figure out how to return the magnet to the chest cavity and push the metal cylinder back into place._

_He paced back and forth by the desk for several minutes, debating who to find and what to tell them. The first thing they’d ask would be what he’d done to the genius, and while Bucky didn’t want to watch him die, he didn’t want to be accused of killing him either._

_“Sweet Jesus!” Stark’s expletive and the jerking way he sat up had Bucky fluttering around him, steadying his shoulder as he sat up. Stark had stared pointedly down at his chest for several long breaths before looking up at Bucky, eyes far more open than he deserved. “You breathe not a word of this.”_

_“I couldn’t explain it if I wanted to,” Bucky said. And he couldn’t. The cylinder was so deep in Stark’s chest. The man should be dead and yet…_

_“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”_

_It had been the start of something...well, it wasn’t beautiful, but it was more fun than Bucky remembered having in years. It felt a lot like forgiveness. It felt a lot like living._

#

_“What do you mean you only have so many of these?” Bucky asked, dodging the dead reactor Stark threw over his shoulder._

_“I mean the amount of electricity needed to make a fusion chamber would put a big neon sign over our head announcing ‘Tony Stark is Here’ in arc reactor blue. I don’t think we need our coordinates flashed across the globe.”_

_“But you go through them all the time,” Bucky said. And Stark did. He’d seen the man change out at least five since he’d come to the compound. “You said it keeps you alive. You can’t just run out—”_

_“Why, exactly, do you think I’m not constantly walking around in the suit?” Stark was exasperated. “I had enough Starkium to make thirty-five of them. If I find myself in a fusion chamber in the future, I’ll make a few more, alright Mom?”_

_Bucky froze. It was a joke, but one that prodded at a wound they’d both been babying for the last several months. Stark plowed onward, every bit the same as he’d been before. It took nearly five minutes for him to realize Bucky wasn’t bantering back._

_“What?” he asked, and Bucky watched as Stark did that thing where he thought back over the last conversation verbatim. “Mom? Psht. I’m over it, Barnes. Take the leap with me.”_

_That, as they say, had been that. If the last few months had felt like forgiveness, that sentence felt like healing._

#

“Eleven, actually,” Stark said. 

“Eleven,” Bucky repeated, and something in him sparked to life. Something warmed through the chill that had fallen over him since he’d welcomed the Winter Soldier back into his body. 

“I might have gone through one during the battle,” Stark said with a shrug. “And a few after, blowing shit up.” The anger growing in Bucky flickered at that. How could he be angry? He couldn’t blame the man for needing an out, for needing to break things to keep from breaking inside. 

“Steve never knew about this, did he?” Bucky pointed vaguely at Stark’s chest. Saying Steve’s name wasn’t as hard as Bucky thought it might have been. Tony shrugged but shook his head with a scoff. 

“If he did, do you think he’d have brought his shield down on it?” 

Bucky couldn’t bring himself to answer, because in that moment, he realized exactly how damning it had been to leave the man with a shattered reactor in the middle of nowhere. 

“They held the procession for you.” 

“It’s the jet, not a procession.” 

“T’Challa’s flying solo, and I’m taking the suit,” Stark defended, but both of them knew. Steve deserved better. He deserved a real funeral procession, one strangers on the street lined up to watch. One where men and women and children cried. He deserved the twenty-one gun salute and the flag on his coffin. 

He deserved more than the world had given him in the last year, more than Bucky had given him. 

“Better not keep them waiting,” Bucky said at last. Stark didn’t comment. The engineer just fell in step beside him, and if he stood closer than the corridor demanded or brushed the back of his hand against Bucky’s as they walked, neither said anything. 

They laid him to rest beneath a sycamore in Central Park. It was dangerous, going back to New York City, but almost the whole thing had been leveled. The people left wouldn’t say anything about the Avengers landing in Central Park, which might have been the only dash of green left against the landscape for miles.

The coffin was a rich, deeply colored wood Steve would have found extravagant. It was made mostly by hand, sanded, stained and put together with an engineer’s expert attention to detail. The park they laid him in was everything Steven Rogers wanted from the world: simplicity and purity and peace. 

They dug a hole, made a coffin, laid him to rest, and they spent the better part of the morning telling war stories. Or Bucky told war stories. Tony hadn’t even landed in the armor, and had Bucky not watched him change the reactor before they’d left, he’d have been worried. 

As it was, Stark had never been good at goodbyes. 

As the sun set over the top of Steve’s sycamore, Bucky left to find Tony, just as the rest of the rays disappeared. The former billionaire stood in the wreckage of Avengers Tower. Bucky never knew it as such, but the large A was still mostly intact — though separated from the building and laying a good thirty yards away. 

Bucky never saw the Tower as Steve described it, never heard the voice in the ceiling Stark talked about fondly in the small hours of the morning. He never spent lazy Sundays in the common room, watching movies and eating team meals. There were things Bucky would never do, never have the chance, but he didn’t know them to miss them. 

Tony did, and the call of memory was stronger after someone died. He stood in the wreckage, stripped down to the undersuit and boots, but Bucky couldn’t find it in himself to yell. A slow drizzle had started, and the both of them were damp. Bucky would be fine. He hadn’t been sick since the serum. Stark was just a man though, just human. Iron Man was gold titanium alloy, but Tony? Tony Stark? He wasn’t, though they all often forgot. 

“Hiding out here?” 

To Tony’s credit — and Natasha’s endless insistence he needed vigilance training — Tony didn’t startle. He just kept staring at something in the wreckage. 

“You gonna answer me?” 

It took three strides and two seconds to figure it out. Bucky had grown up with Steve in the before, knew he preferred leather bound sketchbooks to anything else. Back before, they’d been unable to afford them, and Steve had sketched on old newspaper. In the compound, Steve had a stack of leather bound sketchbooks nearly hip high. 

This one had been singed on the front cover, most likely from the explosion that brought the tower down. It was in the lee of the wreckage and protected from the elements by the fall of the helicopter pad. Bucky bent, wrenched the concrete holding it down, and pulled the book from beneath it. The cover fell away in puffs of ash, but the first image was clean and clear. The commandos stood there, all of them in fatigues and going about daily business. Dugan was cooking something in a squat camp stove over a low fire. Izzy Cohen was telling a story to three others, their backs turned, but Bucky would bet money it was Rebel, Gabriel, and Manelli. He could just make out Junior and Pinky playing cards over a pile of cigarettes.

In the background, a grayed out form watched over them all, and Bucky knew it was Steve. The punk never did take the time to draw himself clearly, but he was usually there, in the background. He found himself a moment later, standing off in a corner alone, leaning against a tent pole. 

The detail there was startling, and it took several long minutes before Bucky could turn the page. The next was just as detailed. The Avengers — or the original core of them — sat around a table. A large, pale haired man sat in the middle, taking up a two person share of the table and the sketch. He wore intricate armor and an endless smile. His arms were up and his mouth open, as if he had been telling a story. Thor, Bucky realized. He’d yet to meet the God of Thunder, but he’d heard stories. 

To his left sat Clint, slumped against the seat with his head back as if he’d passed out despite everything going on around them. His face was slack, though there were shadows beneath his eyes and a grim set to his mouth Bucky recognized. Clint still got that look from time to time. The sketch of the archer brought the Soldier too close to the surface, so he let his eyes wander. 

Natasha was eating, picking at something on a plate in front of her that Steve had sketched as simple shaded lines. She was giving Thor an amused glance, bite halfway to her lips. Her hair was shorter than it was now, cut to the ankle of her cheekbones. It suited her, he decided. She was as beautiful now, but he liked the danger in the angles. So had Steve, if the way he’d drawn her was any indication. 

Steve — sketched loosely — was on Thor’s right, and even in the lazy, half-interested way Steve had of drawing himself, Bucky could tell he was tired. An unassuming man sat between Steve and Stark, and it could be none other than Bruce Banner, a man Bucky had met only briefly before the funeral. He’d come back for it, or rather, Stark had drug him back. 

The Tony in the sketch was drawn angrily, and the harsh lines startled Bucky for a moment. Steve had always spoken at least neutrally about Tony Stark, but the pressure on the pencil, the anger with which he’d made the lines, the arrogance on the other man’s face…

“You didn’t get along,” he said simply, eyes flickering to Tony. Stark scoffed and shook his head. 

“Could tell you stories of those first months.” 

“I could listen,” Bucky offered. Stark didn’t respond. 

The next several sketches were made unrecognizable by something soaked into the paper. They became clear again halfway through the book. There was one of Natasha in the training room, holding a yoga pose. Another of Bruce Banner, making tea in an old china pot. Clint in the range, fiddling with the fletching of an arrow. 

The last Bucky looked at was of Tony, sitting on a couch, attention half on a conversation Pepper and Rhodey were having on either side of him and half on his phone. This was a softened picture, one with slow, easy lines with an attention to detail on Stark that astounded. Bucky could recognize the upturn at the corner of his mouth, a pair of moles on his jawline. 

“You should keep that,” Bucky said. His voice was thick and hoarse to his own ears. He held the sketchbook out to Tony, who took it after a long hesitation. They stood there in the rain, Bucky’s hair plastered down around his ears and neck and Stark dripping into the pavement. 

“A world without Captain America,” Tony said after the silence grew too heavy between them. Bucky glanced at him carefully. He knew that self-deprecating tone. “This is what I’ve done. This is my legacy.” He didn’t recognize the words at first, didn’t process them for what they were until a devastated, resigned look settled onto Tony’s face. 

“This is what the world did,” Bucky said, but the look never vanished. He didn’t know how to chase it away. Stark turned away from him, tapped his wrist assembly, and was gone, burning atmosphere and leaving Bucky alone in the darkness. “Suicidal idiot.” The words did no good for anyone. The sketchbook lay forgotten in the mud where Stark dropped it.

In the drizzling rain, he couldn’t help but remember all the promises he’d made Steve over the course of their lives. All the promises Steve made back. The last one, the one he couldn’t get out of his head, was the one he’d made time and time again. 

The end of the line. 

“Liar,” he whispered. 

He repeated himself three more times before he realized he didn’t know who he was talking about: Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, or himself.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, and three promises.

Chapter Three: Whiskey Lies

Tony sat on a hillside as the sun came up in rural Ohio. In the early morning dawn glow, the world came alive peacefully, like something out of a Jane Austin novel he would never admit to reading. From near the top of the soft, rolling hill, Tony could see everything for a mile in all directions. The smell of lavender wafted up from a field of wildflowers behind him, caressing his back on the wind. 

In the distance, to the west, a river twisted around a wooded field. Tony could see two deer grazing at the edge of the wood, and he briefly debated firing a repulsor into the air just to scatter them. That would be petty, though, and he had promised himself not to bring his bullshit here. Instead, he watched the sun creep up across a swath of land covered in prairie grass and wildflowers and little scrub bushes. 

It had taken him the better part of the night to get to the hill from Central Park, where he’d left the sketchbook. His arc reactor had faded in flight, but he had to be there, on the hillside. There was no where else he could see himself going other than the bottom of a bottle, and he’d made so many promises in the last year and a half. Hell, he’d made three of them to Steve alone regarding his alcohol consumption. He’d kept them all, too. 

Tony glared at the brown paper bag at his feet. He was debating breaking all of them. 

#

_“Tony?” Steve’s voice was hesitant, uneasy as it came through the speaker on the phone. Tony had stared down at it for a few, startled seconds, shocked Steve had answered. Tony are you there?”_

_He hung up the call three times before he answered that question._

_“Tony?” Steve’s voice was exasperated the fourth time, almost amused. Tony thought he could draw a picture of Steve’s face in that moment, just from his tone. “Tony, are you —”_

_“The correct question, Captain, is why I’m calling.” He couldn’t help the snark, the flippant dismissal of Steve’s question. The sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line knocked the bluster from him._

_“Why are you calling, Tony?”_

_“Have you been reading your newspaper? Because the United States of America has been a little lost without its Captain.” The betrayed part of himself couldn’t say Steve’s name, couldn’t even cut the lies and say they needed him. They implied Tony, and Tony wasn’t ready for that just yet._

_“What am I supposed to do?” There was defeat in the tone of his voice. “My team’s gone. I can’t even take care of myself.” That was a blow to Tony’s gut. It had taken a full minute for either of them to speak again. “Tony?”_

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing against the rising lump in his throat. The bare resignation there, in the Captain’s tone, somehow settled the indignation in Tony’s chest. “Your team’s here, Steve. Come home.” 

_“I want to. You know I want to, but—”_

_“Bring him,” Tony said. He had to. He had to say it before the thought curdled and died in his throat, turning sour. “God knows we need him.”_

_“Tony…” Steve didn’t finish the thought. “We’re going to need a ride.”_

#

Tony snagged the brown bag from the grass. The bottle inside was small, cheap, and whiskey far too dark. He didn’t take the bottle out, just turned the bag over and over in his hands. 

#

_Tony sat with one ankle thrown up on the other knee, dress suit in place and a tumbler of his best scotch safely in hand. The bottle was on the small flight table in front of him. The jet — he’d decided the day prior — was the only way to collect the Captain and his Frozen Friend, and no one would be a better escort than Tony himself. Which meant, against all good sense, Tony was going to get them._

_Tony...was going to get James Barnes. James Barnes...who was the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier...who had been the puppet of evil men. It was about as much fun as a bag of cats, but Tony was trying. It had been those men that had ordered the death of his parents, pointed a weapon. Tony hadn’t blamed the bomb when it came down on Xavier’s School, not the nuke that came to New York. He couldn’t blame Barnes — or at least that was what he was trying to get the traitorous heart still beating in his chest to understand._

_Tony tossed back half of the glass, glaring morosely at the open passenger door of the private jet. It was best he was here, afterall. T’Challa could contain their first meeting; plus, they’d find out their self control was going to bail out somewhere over the Atlantic and not in a crowded city._

_He considered pouring another couple fingers, tapping idly at the lid of the bottle. The liquor sloshed happily into the glass once more and once again. Thirty minutes and three once mores later, he heard Steve coming up the steps. Steve, and a lighter pair of footsteps Tony couldn’t imagine belonging to Barnes._

_“Tony?” Steve asked, uneasily shifting next to the bulkhead._

_“Come on in, Captain,” Tony said, setting his glass aside. It was empty again, but the buzz in his gut was probably already too warm. He gestured toward one of the reclining chairs across from him. He had been strategic with his choice of seat — the only solo one in the jet, across the aisle, a table to move out of the way if he happened to lunge for Barnes’ neck. Not that he planned on lunging at anyone’s neck. He had a plan. He had welcome home gifts for Odin's sake._

_Steve took the seat slowly, but T’Challa leaned casually against the bulkhead._

_“I am here to assure you are not going to murder my charge on his way back to the United States,” T’Challa said. Tony appreciated the quiet confidence in the man, the straight-forward way he addressed the situation._

_“Wasn’t my plan, but that’s the definition of dynamic truth, isn’t it?” He waved a hand dismissively, but if the way his hand seemed to float in the air was any indication, he couldn’t even if he wanted. Hard liquor had snuck up on him in his old age._

_“All the same, I would like your word, as a man, that you will not prove dangerous to James Barnes.”_

_“My word as a...clearly you have zero understanding of my personal flaws,” Tony said. “But you have my word as a businessman, and that’s about as good as you’re going to get out of me. It would cost a fortune to replace the jet, pay off the pilot and stewardess’s medical expenses and medical trauma.”_

_T’Challa shook his hand the way a man was supposed to shake a hand — firm, confident, friendly and just a little dangerous. It reminded Tony as to why the handshake was invented. Some part of his mind wondered if T’Challa was left or right handed._

_“I will send out the Sergeant after you have had time to talk. Ten minutes shall suffice?”_

_When neither Tony nor Steve answered, the Wakandan King simply nodded and left._

_“It’s not fair he’s that good looking. King. Ladies’ man. Multi-billionaire. Being good looking just makes everyone dislike him.” Tony glared out the door after him, but startled when Steve gave a huff of amusement._

_“I seem to remember someone telling me they were a genius, billionaire, playboy philanthropist. I don’t see why you’re complaining.”_

_“Well, obviously I’m eccentric and exhausting.” His hands itched, so he picked up his empty glass, rolled it back and forth along his palms._

_“You’re certainly eccentric, Mr. Stark,” Steve said, settling forward so his elbows rested on his knees. “You didn’t have to come get us yourself, Tony. It would have been—”_

_“See, I figured that. It would have been easier...until we were forced to work together in the shit show that’s DC right now. It would have been easier until someone ended up dead because we couldn’t deal. Not the best battle plan, in the long run, and Captain? Call me Mr. Stark again, and I’m not giving you your homecoming present.”_

_“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Steve said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat._

_“Just say thank you and be grateful like a good boy scout.”_

_“Alright, Tony. When do I get my homecoming present?” There was a smile tugging up the corner of Steve’s mouth, and Tony realized for the first time that they’d been speaking for close to two minutes without either of them throwing an insult — or worse, a punch. Actually, the worst case scenario would have been a shield, but…_

_“Want, want, want. You kids back in the day.” He pulled the wooden box from behind his seat anyway. It was a nice, deep cherry, polished to a red shine and emblazoned with Rogers’ name on the side. He gave it an experimental shake, knowing full well the packing inside would keep everything in place. “Here.” He tossed the box, and Rogers caught it with deft hands._

_“Don’t throw my present, Stark,” Steve said, voice laced with something Tony hadn’t heard before._

_“Was that...was that sass, Rogers?” Tony asked, half incredulous and half joking. “If you’re going to sass me, young man, I’ll take that—”_

_“This…” Steve had opened the box._

_“Is yours. I was wrong to say you didn’t deserve it. I was wrong to try and take it away from you.” The words had been rehearsed, but they’d fallen off his tongue with such ease now that he forgot what he’d wanted to say. Apologies had never been his strong suit, but he figured if they were going to make it through a nearly day long flight, it was the best place to start._

_“No,” Steve said firmly, and for a second, Tony thought he was going to catch the shield in his teeth. “No, you weren’t. I...Captain America wouldn’t refuse governmental sanction and oversight, not even for a friend.” Steve sighed and scrubbed at his face with both hands, the shield balanced across his knees. “People forget I was Steve Rogers a long time before I was Captain America.”_

_And wasn’t that a kick in the spleen? Because that? Tony could understand that. He was Tony Stark for a long time before he was the Merchant of Death, and he was that death dealer for a long time before he was Iron Man. He’d only just gotten to be Iron Man before he was an Avenger, and then he’d been some political figurehead trying his damnedest to still just be Iron Man, just be an Avenger._

_“I don’t think Howard made that for Captain America,” Tony said. “I think he made it for Steve Rogers, and I’m not giving it back to Captain America.”_

_Had Tony known the words would cause something suspiciously like tears to well in the Captain’s eyes, he might have made some quip instead. Either way, it was too late to take it back._

_“Don’t get emotional on me, Rogers. Just say you’ll wear my corsage to prom and move on.” Maybe it was never too late because Steve laughed and swiped at his eyes with thumb and pointer finger before slipping the shield on his forearm and settling back into the chair._

_“It’s been ten minutes,” Steve said. “And we still haven’t talked about what we were supposed to talk about.”_

_“I’m not going to murder your friend over the Atlantic,” Tony said easily, but he poured himself another half a glass, disappointed Captain America stare and all. It was sweet and cool on the way down, which probably meant he shouldn’t have done it, but he wa a grown ass man. “Besides, I’ve made the mental — if not emotional — decision to not hate him for something that wasn’t his fault. So...here’s to your health and his.” The next one burned if only because he forced the whole thing down in one swallow before upending the glass on a hand towel and tucking the bottle away._

_What? He had some self control._

_“If we’re going to cause you…” Steve started a few long minutes later. “If Buck and I being around is going to make…”_

_Tony had never seen Steve stumble over his words before, never heard him struggle with what he wanted to say or how he wanted to say it. It was more than a little unnerving._

_“Spit it out. Frosty is coming up the runway. No hard feelings about whatever you’re going to say, Cap. If we can’t communicate, this is going to go for shit real quick.” It was true, but mostly he was already tired, already sick of being careful._

_“If you’re going to have to drink to get over Bucky being here, we can find somewhere else to be,” Steve said finally, eyes on the bottle. Tony glared at the super soldier, at the way he didn’t seem to be able to meet his eyes, at every line of him that spoke of disappointment and depreciation and disillusionment and every other word starting with a “d” Tony could ponder._

_“If I...have to…” The words were tripping over each other, trying to come out and not trying to offend all at once. Tony figured that he’d reached fuck it at this point and just opened his mouth. “If I ever have to crawl into a bottle to get over your bestie being in my personal space, I’ll be sure to let you know. Until then, I am an adult with my own decision making skills. If I want a drink, it’s because I want a drink, not because I can’t handle the emotional baggage of the ages.”_

_“I’ll hold you to that,” Steve said, eyes finally leaving that bottle and anchoring Tony to his seat. Just like that, Tony wished he hadn’t opened his outraged mouth._

_The sound of boots on metal finally drew his attention away from Steve and to the bulkhead. Barnes was...well._

_Tony wanted him to still have that haunted look in his eye, that stand-offish air to make him unapproachable. Instead, he was drawn in but confident, hesitant and guilty but alive, real. There was none of the subhuman with zero emotion Tony had seen in Siberia, on the newsreels._

_“Barnes,” Tony said simply. “Have a seat or you don’t get your welcome home present.”_

_Barnes hesitated in the doorway, glancing toward Steve and the shield on his arm, and sat down. “I get a homecoming present?” he asked, still hesitant. His sharp eyes had settled on the upturned glass for a fraction of a second before skittering along._

_Tony didn’t bother to answer the question. He just stood up and moved to the rear of the plane, and came back with it in tow. This had been part self-indulgence and part guilt, but it had gone well, and Tony had only ever been more proud of the suits and JARVIS._

_“T’Challa’s scientists sent me the base plate they put in in place of the one I...ah...the one I ripped out.” The arm wasn’t anything like the old. It wasn’t stronger than Steve’s last testing, wasn’t shiny or adorned with the red star. It was, at the shoulder at least, a dark flat grey where the metal was exposed. A pale, fleshy covering was stretched down over the entire arm from fingertip to the plate attachment, tiny wires and sensors running out in an array from the top to a needle. “You take it. You decide when you want it on, and we can either install it in the lab or I can find someone else to—”_

_The arm was pulled out of his hands with firm strength. Barnes stared at it with carefully guarded eyes before turning toward Steve. “My present is better than your present,” he said simply, and went about poking at the prosthetic skin tissue._

_“I demand a refund,” Steve said, but his tone was soft and he was staring at Bucky with wide-eyed wonder that made Tony shift uncomfortably._

_“Sass!” he shouted, flopping into the chair. “The sass in you!”_

#

Tony unwrapped the bottle from the paper bag. It had been a long couple of days, a long couple of months, if he was honest, but it hadn’t seemed like such a losing battle until now. Steve was gone. Clint was gone. Lang was talking about turning in the suit for immunity. Hell, even the remaining rag-tag group of Xavier’s kids were talking about the cut and run. Logan had old friends in Tokyo offering him sanctuary. Ororo was apparently a goddess to some small tribe in Africa...or South America. Tony hadn’t exactly mastered the geography of the world, alright? The girl, Cat or Kitten or something, had disappeared months ago, and the only one that wasn’t talking about leaving was the one they didn’t need. Jubilee was as young as they came if they still wanted to be called adult. Her abilities were rough at best, a distraction at worst, but she was courage and pomp and everything that had been beaten out of the rest of them. 

Tony felt the weight of the hill at his back, the promise there, if he turned and laid down and just didn’t get back up. He cracked the top of the bottle. 

He’d drank for worse reasons. 

#

_Ross had been campaigning against the Avengers for the last week, but Tony was an old friend to the smear tactic and his name being used as a slur._

_“Mr. Stark is one of the most irresponsible adults I’ve encountered in my life. We’re talking about a man that allowed someone else to control every adult decision he made in the first thirty years of his life, and after? He lost his company millions in weapons contracts, endangered civilians, and directly impeded governmental involvement in several maneuvers in the Middle East.” Ross paused to give the camera a wry smile. “Is this the man you want to give control of the most advanced manned weaponry in the world? Is this the man you want making decisions in the heart of battle? Wasn’t it Stark’s order to fire on his own former teammate that crippled another? The actions taken by Mr. Stark during the Accords were not only irresponsible, but it showed a complete lack of loyalty to his comrades in arms.”_

_Tony felt that more acutely than he’d ever felt any smear campaign in his life because Rhodey? Well, Rhodey still couldn’t walk without the neural net and the braces, and even that made his back and legs ache after a few minutes. The former colonel had taken to wearing the armor’s legs around more often than not. Hearing that thrown back at him? Yeah._

_He really could turn off the newscast, but then who would know what was being said? Who would put their mind to altering public perception, to cutting the head off the snake?_

_He tipped back the last of a tumbler and poured himself another._

_The interview lasted another ten minutes, and Ross spoke through most of it. He’d briefly touched on Rhodey, calling his defense of Tony Stark Stockholm Syndrome. That? Well, after that little bomb, Tony had abandoned the glass all together. It was slowing him down._

_Three minutes left in the interview, Steve took the bottle away, scolding Tony with his eyes if not his words._

_“This isn’t worth it,” he said easily. “Don’t punish yourself for something someone who doesn’t matter thinks about you.”_

_“I’m not—”_

_“You are,” Steve said, turning off the interview. “We’re not listening to this anymore.”_

_“If I don’t know what everyone thinks about us, I can’t counter it later.”_

_“Then I’ll watch the ones about you, and you watch the ones about me. We’ll get Clint or Nat to watch the ones about Bucky.”_

_Tony considered a moment. “Don’t let Clint make any decisions about public relations.”_

_“I won’t if you don’t do this again.”_

_“You on a campaign to single handedly save me from my liver?” Tony asked, but he nodded never-the-less.v_

_#_

__Tony Stark was sightless. There was nothing in the world as terrible as the flickering thing in his brain, so his eyes had to have stopped working. It had to have come from deep within the darkest recesses of his nightmares, the place where his own hellish imagination met with every terrible thing that had ever colored his life._ _

__Howard and Stane. Yinsen and rockets and a woman in a uniform. Every bad decision Tony ever made. They all smoldered in his soul. And this? This didn’t compare to any of them._ _

__“We’re just getting report that the United States government has sanctioned the bombing of the former Stark Industries building in New York City. The former Stark company recently went through a change of CEO and name, but it seems Science Inc and Stark Industries were still too closely related for General Thaddeus Ross, who had this to say to reporters earlier today.”_ _

__The woman on the screen with her blonde hair and her pretty eyes looked torn as the screen cut to a recording from earlier in the day._ _

__“We have to settle these things with definitive action. We have to prove to these dangers to the American people that they cannot hide behind a different name, a different face. They can’t break our laws, endanger our people, and hide behind their money. Myself and the United States military are deeply saddened by the innocent loss of lives this operation has created, but the bigger picture here needs to be addressed. Anthony Stark, if he has any feeling for anyone in this building, will turn himself in by the end of the day. His team will follow, or we’ll destroy every hiding hole they have left.”_ _

__Ross looked tired. He should. They’d been making his life a living hell for the last few months, and now….well. He’d called their bluff. Spectacularly._ _

__“There you have General Thaddeus Ross on the disaster which occurred early today at the former Stark Industries. We will continue to bring you live coverage as long as the area remains stable to do so. Now, we take you live to Christine, just two blocks from the epicenter of the bombing in Manhattan. Christine?”_ _

__“Jesus,” Tony muttered, eyes glued to the wreckage on screen. Men and women ran into and out of rolling smoke and dust that obscured the tower itself. Ambulances and fire crews worked to put out small fires cropping up behind the debris, bringing bodies out on stretchers._ _

__One, a tall woman in a three piece suit, stumbled out of the wreckage, and for one terrified moment, Tony thought it was Pepper. Pepper._ _

__“Pepper.” His hands fumbled for his cell phone. Even with his eyes lying to him, his ears seemed to work. Deft fingers hit the speed dial on the burner phone, waiting for the ring tone that would never come._ _

__“Tony?” Steve’s voice startled him in the seemingly endless ringing. “Tony, what can we do?”_ _

__Tony couldn’t answer. Answering meant Steve had seen it, too. It was real, and Pepper had been in that building because it was noon on a Monday. Pepper had been._ _

__The next three weeks were just alcohol and pot shots at shit in the forest._ _

__“Tony?” Steve asked, voice a mix of concern and Captain America Disappointment (Trademark: Stark Incorporated). “Come on, Tony, let’s get you back to the bunker.”_ _

__“W’for?” Tony knew he was slurring, knew he’d been slurring for days, that he’d pushed his liver and body beyond any rational limit. There was no rational anymore. The world was a confusing place filled with fucked up people who deserved—_ _

__“For yourself, Tony,” Steve said. He took Tony’s elbow, tugging him back toward the bunker._ _

__Tony scowled down at the hand, at the strength there, but he shrugged it off. He picked up the empty bottle from the ground by his foot and tipped it over his mouth for good measure. Nothing trickled out, but the sigh behind him came anyway._ _

__“Pull,” Tony muttered, tossing the bottle up and away from him, bringing the gauntlet up and firing three times as it spun end over end. Finally, the glass shattered, vaporizing in the blast._ _

__“Your accuracy is shit when you’re drinking. Then again, if I’d had as much to drink as you’ve had, I don’t think I could stand up.”_ _

__“Pr’tice,” Tony said with a shrug. He considered the pair of them — Barnes and Rogers — with their crossed arms and their matching Super Soldier Stances of Stubbornness ™ . He remembered taking a stumbling step toward a second bottle he had nestled into the roots of an oak._ _

__If he ever got to that bottle, he didn’t remember it. He remembered coming to in a cold shower, the gauntlet missing and Bucky Barnes leveraging him against the wall. There was a vacant, lost look on the man’s face as the frigid water pounded onto their heads, down their necks and shoulders, but Barnes didn’t complain about the water or the vicious threats that slipped off Tony’s tongue and lept into the world._ _

__The vacancy in Barnes’s eyes, the pain in Steve’s, should have hurt more than they did, but hours later, as sobriety crept up on him, the pounding headache, sea-tossed stomach, were nothing. Memory, sharp and tearing and real, was far worse._ _

__“Tony?” Steve asked, and when had Steve squatted down in front of him? “Tony, you can’t keep doing this.”_ _

__“I can’t, Steve,” Tony said. It was true. It was more true than anything else had ever been. He had nothing left in the world if Pepper Potts was gone because of him. Pepper who had been his spine, and how was Tony supposed to stand without a spine?_ _

__A weight settled against the bed just behind him, and it shifted the bed enough that Tony rolled slightly back into the long line of Barnes. It put him at an angle where he had to look at Steve._ _

__“Yes, you can,” Steve said easily, pushing the hair back from where it was plastered against Tony’s forehead. There was a smile on his lips like he knew something Tony didn’t, like he could stare down through skin and bone and flesh and see something mankind hadn’t in forty years. “And if you can’t, you find one of us. You can’t drink your way to her, Tony.”_ _

__He could hear the question there, feel the resolution of that question in the way Barnes shifted closer._ _

__“Promise him,” Barnes said. It was an odd thing to be asked to do. Not the promise itself, but that it wasn’t asked for the asker._ _

__“You want to sit and listen to Johnny Cash and drink alcohol that won’t do jack shit for you?” Tony asked._ _

__“If that’s what you have to do,” Steve said. “We can’t tear ourselves apart, not if we’re going to win this.”_ _

__Tony, miserable and aching at the core of him, with Barnes at his back and Steve’s hand on his knee, nodded shakily twice before he was able to clear his throat enough to speak. “If I can’t.”_ _

_#_

_Tony sighed and upended the bottle, watching as the amber liquid drained away into the grass, all but a cap full he’d poured to start. Carefully, he stood up and turned toward the hill._

_There, at the crest, in the grass with pale purple flowers growing around it in sparse patches, was the deep green marble someone had picked out for Pepper’s mausoleum. At each corner were pale cream marble pillars, carved in different biblical scenes Tony was sure Steve had selected. There wasn’t another among them Christian and practicing enough to have done so._

_Her name, her real name — not that stiff Virginia her parents saddled her with — was carved delicately above a pair of wrought iron doors, gold inlay in the letters. The doors themselves were delicate, twisted metal that seemed to grow up out of the ground like vines, twisting off in places into leaves and flowers, before rising up to the top where they became sun rays and clouds and birds soaring overhead._

_“Here, Pep,” he said, setting the cap down on the stone step to the mausoleum. “You never liked bourbon, but I figure Steve can finally get drunk and that thimble full might be enough for him.”_

_If Tony slept there that night, curled up around a quarter of a shot of bourbon with the cool stone at his back, no one would know._


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Practice in Perfection

The Brotherhood collapsed a month ago, and while some of them skulked in holes, fighting whoever they could fight, she wasn’t one to bite fingers as they reached for her. She’d always been the type to hit hard, hit fast, and leave the earth salted in her wake. Before the fallout, she’d never had the strength to do this kind of damage though.

She’d never fought the good fight, never had the chance. Her mutation triggered as the Stark building fell down around her head, and the last bit of the world she knew crumbled. Crumbled down around her head while the lost child of a coworker screamed at her feet. The world screamed with the child, screamed with her lungs, and with a burst of energy that felt like she was being torn, apart, it was whole again. 

_“Do you know where—” The little girl’s breath was stolen as she ducked, gripped her by her armpits, and ran with her. “Mommy!” the child screamed, tiny little lungs forcing out great gasps of air in a terrified plea for help._

_“Mam!” a guard shouted as she raced past him, threw the pair of them down a stairwell, fear and memory echoing in her mind._

_She hit the ground floor when the bombing started, and it was with debris raining down on herself and the child that she stumbled out onto the street, breath coming fast and hard, heart hammering beneath her ribcage._

_Sunlight filtered through dust and debris, smoke and screams. Sirens wailed out the cry of a thousand lives lost, and the little girl sobbed in her arms, still and silent._

Magneto found her a few weeks later, and a few days later, and a few days later still. He chased her across three weeks and he never knew it. In the end, it was the persistence, the way he promised they could do more than kick the skins of the playground bully. 

And he had. For several weeks, he had. Not even Magneto could catch a plastic spike needle fired from a plastic gun. 

Not even the great Magneto could quell the mutant cure, poison in his veins. He couldn’t fight the cotton candy sleep of pentobarbital, the warm, paralyzing embrace of pancuronium bromide, or the cold, heart-stopping kiss of potassium chloride. 

Three days after they put him in a cardboard box and shoved him into an incinerator, she learned how to step back in time without fear or panic making it come to the surface. It took another two months to go more than a few hours, and another few to muster the courage to really try for the first time. 

She failed more miserably alone than she ever had in her life. The first time she tried to take someone back with her, they ended up weeks earlier than she’d intended. Practice, as they said, made perfect.

Mystique. Magneto. Avalanche. Domino. 

It didn’t matter who she took back with her; it still ended the same. The world burning. She’d changed things, altered the how and when of things, but they still ended in a country in shambles. She watched the United States burn once, twice, dozens of times before she grabbed Bucky Barnes. 

He died in front of the White House, sixteen bullets in his body and a smirk on his lips. It was the closest she’d ever gotten to overthrowing the tyrannical government that plunged the country into chaos, and it was the first time she’d taken someone from the other side.

She tried others.

Steve Rogers. Natasha Romanoff. Wolverine. 

This would be the last time. 

The alarm went through the compound, loud even above ground. She sat down on the grass, legs splayed out in front of her and arms behind, holding her in a haphazard reclined position in the sunlight. A dull, shifting noise drew her attention before a door opened up five yards in front of her.

Bucky Barnes was...impressive. They’d been on unsteady feet the first time, dancing around each other’s different quirks, but he’d been nothing if not impressive. The arm, a dull, shining grey after the prosthetic skin burned away, was intimidating at first. Stark had upgraded it as the months had drawn on — first to be stronger, then to house little rockets. She’d seen him snap the pinky finger off and use it as a grenade once, when he died on the White House lawn. 

Seeing him come up from the dark, scowl in place and a semi-auto slung over his shoulder, she smiled. Stark was half a step behind him, the suit closing around his torso as he came through the hole. She considered him the first time, thought if anyone’s mind could wrap around time travel it would have been Stark’s. In the end, Barnes had been on patrol, and he’d been the easy grab. Since, Stark seemed to be below ground more than he wasn’t — without the suit more than he wasn’t. 

“Who the hell are you?” 

The cool press of a pinpoint against her neck was startling, as were the words growled out over her shoulder. A whisper of breath against her ear, the chill of the blade, where unexpected, given that Barnes and Stark were still making their way through the last few steps from the compound. The voice was vaguely familiar in the way that most voices were now, but it was chilled, empty like many became toward the end.

Deja vu was one of those things that came unbidden anymore. She’d heard that voice on a battlefield as they fought five or six minutes at each other’s back before a bullet ricocheted through his skull. That time, she’d been bleeding out on the ground somewhere in Texas when she slipped back through time. 

“Hello, Hawkeye,” she said, turning as far as the blade would allow. The warm trickle of blood tickled her neck on its way toward her collar. 

“Answer the question,” Barnes said, and she turned to smile at him. He’d liked that smile before, liked the wind-blown ease of it. She practiced in the mirror for weeks before she got it right. Smiling, after all, was just another way to bear your teeth. 

“The question you want to ask is: what am I doing here? The answer to which is that I’ve come on a little recruiting mission.” 

“We’ve got a team, thanks,” Stark said. 

“I’m not recruiting a team,” she said, tossing one leg over the other. “I’m recruiting for a mission. One time, fix everything, and everyone goes back to their lives.” She sat, watching as Barnes came toward her, stopping a few feet away. His expression was dark, a thundercloud coming over the horizon, full of promise and menace.

“We’re not looking to fix your problems,” Hawkeye said. She felt him shift, felt the knife fall away. She glanced behind her and sighed. “And you can’t fix ours.” 

“I’m going to make fun of you for this,” she said simply. She reached out, grabbed Barnes by the arm, and let the tide of time wash over her. Thirty seconds, a minute, and the sound of the alarm was in her ear again. 

Before the fallout, she had been a weekend gym go-er. She’d done some brief time in a kickboxing class before she’d quit. In the time between past and present, she’d learned a thing or two. With a handful of years compressed into months and with Mystique and Domino as instructors, it would have been impossible not to learn.

This time, when the door opened, it was Stark out first with Barnes stumbling up, shaking his head in confusion. She heard Hawkeye this time, if only because she knew he was there. When he was close enough, she pivoted on her arm, brought her foot back and caught him in the solar plexus. He went down hard, lungs spasming for air, and she settled on top of him, cross legged on his chest.

A metal arm caught her around the middle, propelling her backward and grounding her on her back a second later, but it was worth the startled look on both Barnes and Barton’s faces. 

“What the hell was that?” Barnes snarled at her. She tapped him twice on the forearm with a sigh. 

“I’m a mutant,” she explained simply. “And I can take you back through time.” 

“That’s impossible,” Stark said, carelessness in his voice. Barnes’ arm fell away from her, and she rolled out away from him onto the grass in search of Barton, who was still on his back. When her fingertips brushed his temple, she smiled. 

“Remember he said that.”

Twenty seconds and Barton was catching her foot as it came toward him, tossing it down and blinking at her with wide, startled eyes. 

“Not impossible,” he breathed. Barnes was still shaking his head by the door. Stark looked back and forth between the two of them, the suit comically twisting each time. 

“What’s not impossible? Catching her kick? Nice job invading our territory and almost flooring Legolas, but that was hardly—” 

“Time travel,” Barnes said, staring at her with a slack jaw. 

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said, standing. “If we could suspend the disbelief on this, I have a proposition for anyone wanting to change the last half a year.” 

“I’m listening,” Barton said, words a choked off exhale. 

She turned toward him, raised an eyebrow and considered. He wasn’t a powerhouse, but he’d survived longer than a lot of the rest almost every time. It was always when forced out of his comfort zone, into the hand to hand of it all, that he died, and even that was usually by someone with a big gun from a bigger distance.

“We’re not seriously—” Barnes laid a hand on Stark’s shoulder to silence him. “But we’re not, are we?”

“I watched Clint sneak up on her once, then I saw her try and kick him before he got close to her,” Barnes said. 

“And unfortunately, you missed my nearly perfect take down,” she said, half pouting. “How’s your stomach, Hawkeye?”

“Holy shit,” Stark said, stumbling half a step backward. The suit fell away around him, and he sat down hard on the grass. “You can’t honestly expect me to believe you… Time is like, my one constant at this point. Don’t take that away from me. Do take that away from me? Don’t? Think of the possibilities.” 

“Want to see?” she asked, rolling to her feet and stepping toward him, hand outstretched. He gave it a look. “Come on Stark, don’t you want to—” He was on his feet then, marching toward her in sure steps, gripping her wrist and waiting. 

“Was that it? Because seriously, I was expecting…” 

She let him wade through time with her for ten seconds before he was sitting on the ground, his armor around him, staring up at her hand. 

“What the actual fuck,” he said. “That...that’s disconcerting, is what it is.”

“Can we move on now, boys?” she asked. 

“How far?” Barton was the one to ask, startlingly clear minded. She turned toward him, considering the hollowed look to his eyes, the edge to the question. 

“Who died?” she asked instead of answering. He recoiled as if shot, and she let him stew on that a moment. 

“Barton…” Stark said, tone resigned. The arched didn’t respond. He just set his jaw and stared at her. 

“I don’t know how far back I can go, and I don’t want to find out. Whoever comes with me goes back six months.”

“Steve.” The name was an exhale off Barnes’ lips. He turned to look at Stark. “Pepper.” 

Stark didn’t look at him, didn’t so much as blink as he stood up, reaching out to condense the suit into a little cube.

“When are we going?” he asked as he retrieved the suit. 

“We?” she asked him, and he only leveled her with an unimpressed look. “I’ve only ever taken two people back before.”

“You’re going to try,” Barnes said simply. He held a hand out, an olive branch she eyed critically before giving him his own ghost-smile. 

“In the morning,” she said, shaking his hand. “For now, you need to decide who’s going. I wouldn’t recommend more than this. You want a limited number of people fucking up, and you also need to know where you were six months ago.”

“So, let’s go,” Clint said firmly. “I’m done waiting—” 

“While playing time-tag with you three has been fun, I’ll be hauling three people back with me on no sleep, no food, and only my good looks and charm to get us through if we go now. Unless you want me to drop you into yourself three days from yesterday, I’d suggest we all get some shut-eye.” 

“That could happen?” Stark asked, mind sharp. 

“The last time I tried with three people, I dropped one of them two months early. I’d been shot, hadn’t slept in days and hadn’t eaten. It was also...three or four tries ago?”

“What’s the harm in being early?” 

“You were a little disoriented after?” she asked, and when none of them answered, she continued. “It’s like waking up a little hung over after a few minutes. A few months will feel like everything inside you is trying to tear its way out while marching bands play through your skull.” 

“Well, that’ll be a great day spent in the Raft,” Clint muttered to himself. 

“Shall we?” she asked, motioning toward the bunker. 

“I don’t invite people into my home who don’t tell me their name,” Stark said, though he was walking toward the door. He paused when she didn’t answer, cocking his head at her. 

“We’re going to run the river of time tomorrow,” she said simply. “Call me River.” 

#

Clint paced in the mess hall, carefully avoiding the quiet looks some of the group were sending him. Natasha still wasn’t back, but she’d radioed in a few hours prior to the alarm. She’d be getting back in later in the evening. The news of Steve’s death wasn’t necessarily shocking, but it did do something for his enthusiasm. 

He’d made so many mistakes in the last few months, so many he could now make better. Except...would he? 

Standing in the mess hall, a few of Xavier’s raggamuffins looking at him like he was crazy and Sam eyeing him critically, he wasn’t so sure. Clint Barton was a kid from Iowa who wanted a wife and kids and a life outside of his abusive father. Somewhere along the line though, Clint Barton became Clint became Hawkeye. And Hawkeye? 

Well, he wanted to protect what Clint Barton had wanted, had fought for, had won. But mostly, he wanted to make a difference in the world. Hawkeye wanted to feel the draw weight against his fingers, the kisser button against his mouth. He wanted to let go and know he was changing things. Clint Barton, with a wife and three kids? Clint couldn’t do that. And Clint? 

Well… 

How much of Clint was left? 

“Sit down.” The command came with a gentle strength at the small of his back, guiding him forward toward one of the abandoned tables. He went without thought, just as he did everything with that voice. “Tell me.” 

He couldn’t look up, couldn’t do anything but stare at the table top and work his throat around the words he didn’t want to breathe life into. 

“The farm was burned when I got there,” he said simply, hands splayed helplessly. “The fields, the barn, the...the house.” 

“You came back.” 

“I want them dead.” 

“We’ll make it happen.” 

His head snapped up, meeting green eyes and pale skin. She was calm as ever even with the split in her lip and the bruising along her temple. She didn’t smile or simper or make him say it. She simply set her jaw and looked him in the eye. 

“Why did I ever bring them back into this?” he asked. 

“Because you love them.” 

“And love is for children,” he said. She didn’t correct him, didn’t shake her head, but she didn’t confirm either.

Hours later, in the small hours of the morning, still sitting at the table in the now empty mess hall, she took a deep inhalation of breath, blew it out through pursed lips and offered: “Maybe…love is for children and those that aren’t afraid of losing it.” 

“I’m afraid, Natasha,” he said after a long pause. “I’ve never been this afraid before. Not with Phil. Not with you.” 

“We can protect ourselves from what you might bring down on our heads,” she said with a shrug. “You didn’t need to.” 

Clint stared into the darkness. If everything went right, if the world was perfect, the first thing he was going to do was send Laura as far away from him as he could get her. 

#

Bucky slept better that night than he had in a week and a half. He was a man of action, of doing things with his own two hands, and this? This was the penultimate chance. If nothing else changed. If the world still fell to shit. If everything imploded around them, Bucky could fix one small thing. That was all that mattered, really. 

Steve beside him instead of under the ground. 

He woke that morning refreshed but on edge, ready for the possibility of a world with Steve Rogers in it again. Six months ago, he’d been either on a plane to the US with Stark or damned close to getting on one. Either way, it wouldn’t change his day to day life much. He only hoped it was close enough to before that Stark had enough time to weaponize the arm. 

He’d have to talk it over with him before they disappeared through time, get him to call sooner, move things along a little bit. Of course, the genius probably had his own plan and would take whatever path he thought would work out better, as he always did, but at least Bucky would have said his piece, made his wishes known. 

He hit the mess hall for coffee and breakfast, finding River sitting alone at a table, sharp eyes watching the men and women wander around her. Her eyes lingered on some more frequently and longer than others. He grabbed two cups of coffee and a pair of bagels before dropping down beside her at the table. 

“Good morning,” he said, voice less raw than it had been in days. 

“You’re decidedly chipper this morning,” she said, taking the coffee and bagel. She upended a creamer and two sugars into it and slid it back across the table to him. He stared down at it carefully for a moment before raising an eyebrow at her. “This isn’t the first time we’ve met.” 

He nodded, took the cup, and sipped at it carefully. 

“We weren’t successful?”

“Closest I’ve ever come.”

“How close?”

“You died on the White House lawn, blood in your smile and Ross’s body cooling beside you.” 

He couldn’t help the smile slipping onto his lips. Over the last few months, there’d been more than one occasion where he’d wanted Ross dead. Him, not the Soldier. 

“That smile,” River said, tipping a finger toward his mouth. “Is dangerous.”

“Never used to be,” he said dropping his head. He’d been a ladies man. His mouth knew how to smile to make the women sidle up to him with big, open eyes. It was another mark of the Soldier on his soul. 

“It’s perfect.” 

When his eyes snapped back up to her, he saw the smile on her lips, dangerous and edged.

#

Tony found Bucky, River, and Clint sitting at the same table just after the breakfast rush had dissipated. He swallowed down a cup of coffee, stole the one sitting in front of Bucky, and grimaced at the cold sugary sweetness as it went down. 

“That is...unpatriotic.” 

“That’s the best you could come up with?” 

“Fuck you, Legolas, I just drank swill water.” 

“Good morning to you too, Sunshine,” River said, pushing her mug over to him. Tony sniffed it, pleased when none of the sugary sweet thickness rose among the coffee scent, and downed it before he could question further. 

“You boys have any questions before we get this party started?” River asked, running a finger against metal of the tabletop. Carefully, she slid her thigh out, catching Hawkeyes knee and Barnes’s foot with her own. 

“Do I have— “ Stark started, but he only got so far before her hand closed around his flailing wrist and they were drawn back into the stream of time. 

One last time.


	5. Chapter Five

Stark stared out over the expanse of New York City, watching as men and women went about their days under the watchful sensors of his Peace Keepers. Each robot was programmed with a kill switch, ready to be triggered at a moment’s notice should someone find a way around his firewalls. Three such triggers existed, one programmed into the cuff at his wrist, one in a pendant around Peppers neck, and yet another in a watch Rhodey never took off. 

It was as safe as he knew how to make them, but the United States Government didn’t know about the failsafe — wouldn’t know about the failsafe if he had anything to say about it. So, they railed against him, called him tyrant and traitor and megalomaniac. 

He would take the insults because New York was still standing, and it would remain standing. The first strike against the city had been against Stark Tower, and that was still several months away. It would be difficult now though, with his army ready to defend it. New York City was a crucible, and it would remain in the hands of the Avengers. 

A hand pressed against his shoulder lightly, and he turned into Pepper’s careful touch. 

“Surveying your kingdom?” she asked, voice that edge between teasing and disappointed. 

“Something like that.” He took the folder she offered him, scanned the SI paperwork, and handed it back. “I told you. I’m not a part of this anymore.” 

“It might not be Stark Industries anymore, but it’s still your baby. I wish you’d come back from whatever place you’ve gone in your head. We miss you out in the real world.” 

Tony Stark was a master of masks, and in the time since he’d suddenly been dumped back into his body, he’d done his best to wear them. Pepper had always been able to see through at least the first few layers. She hadn’t liked what she’d found underneath.

“I will eventually,” he promised, gentling her away from him with careful hands. “Not today.” 

“You’ve been watching too much Game of Thrones again,” Pepper chided. It took Tony’s genius mind a moment to process the reference. How could his mind focus on a fantasy of death and despair when that had been his life for so many months? 

“Guilty,” he lied, and turned back toward the window. Barnes had radioed in that they would be landing within the hour, but the chopper was still not on the horizon. When the door closed behind Pepper, he turned toward his desk, tapped a file on his tablet, and went back to work.

Hiding a fusion chamber in the grid of New York City wasn’t impossible, not when he knew and had time to plan. In the last month since he’d woken up a different man in a different body, he’d not been idle. Nearly half a dozen caches across the United States and at least one in Canada, Mexico, Wakanda, and Italy housed tens of dozens of arc reactors. 

Not sure how long he could hold out in New York, not sure of anything, he made contingencies. A half hour later, as he put the finishing touches on yet another batch of reactors, one such contingency came over the horizon. 

#

Clint had lived the monotony of the raft day in and day out for the last week, each slam of a door, each shout of the guard putting him on edge. The first day was the world hangover of his life, the flu, and Loki’s mind-fuckery fall out all at once. 

Since, he’d been planning. 

Let no one say Hawkeye didn’t have a fucking plan, because this? This was the epitome of forward thinking. He knew exactly what he was going to say, do, be from the second Stark blew down the door until— 

The chink of metal on metal sounded sharp and distinctive, echoing in the wide open ring of cells. Clint was up at the energy fence. It was different, this time, but different didn’t mean better, not until Laura and the kids lived through knowing Clint Barton. Not until Hawkeye managed to do what the man never could.

The door was pried open, a midnight black clad forearm bulged with the strain of forcing the metal apart, and just like that, the first of everything changed. Steve Rogers walked through the door, the star missing from his chest, the shield painted a matt black as it hurtled into the room, colliding with the two guards. The woman fell unconscious, but the big male guard stumbled, pulled up his firearm, and snapped off two quick rounds. The sound echoed against the high ceiling as the bullets ricocheted off of a matt grey forearm as it wrapped around Steve’s chest. 

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Bucky snarled. His gun leveled over his metal arm, firing off a round as he gave Steve a dressing down. The guard fell dead, the bullet torn through his eye socket, just as Stark’s had done. 

“I had it covered.” 

“Right, you had it as covered as— “

“Where’s Stark?” Clint asked, cutting off the argument before it could get off the ground. He was ready to be out of a cell, ready to see his wife and children still living. 

“He said he’d been there, done that, and that we could get you off the Raft ourselves.” Bucky killed the power to the cells with a controlled pulse of something from his arm. 

“Laura?” Clint asked, as he stepped across the threshold. He accepted a handgun with a glance of distaste. 

Barnes and Rogers helped Sam, Wanda, and Scott out of their own cells. Clint considered the gun a moment, assured there was a round in the chamber and a full clip before nodding.

“Good to see you all not Winter Soldiery,” Scott snarked. “Summer is here again.” 

“You’d be surprised,” Bucky muttered. 

Clint knew what that meant. Barnes had been close to the Soldier in those last hours, riding the razor’s edge between control and doing what he’d needed. Natasha had expressed concern in the quiet hours of the morning, but Clint hadn’t considered it until he had untold hours to think and do nothing but stare at a ceiling. 

“Let’s get out of here,” Sam cautioned as the female guard groaned on the floor. “We need to— “

Clint’s gun echoed in the silence of the prison, and the woman fell dead. He had to admit a gun was just as effective as his arrows, even if it lacked the finesse. 

“Woah!” Scott shouted, jumping away from the dead body. “That was completely uncalled for!” 

Snickers erupted from Clint’s mouth, the echo of the past in his mind. Bucky knocked his shoulder companionably on the way to the door, and Clint followed easily. 

This time, there was no rush to the hanger bay, no death defying feats and no rippling explosions as the craft sank. Instead, after they’d gotten airborne and several hundred yards away, Steve pushed a button on the command console, and the raft exploded in the distance. 

Sitting in the back this time, Clint sulked. Stark hadn’t programmed him into the helicopter’s biometric controls, and from the wicked smirk on Barnes’s lips, it had been forgotten on purpose. 

#

Bucky put the helo down carefully, swearing a blue streak as Steve popped the door and jumped the last ten feet. He’d been prickly lately, and this time around, he’d lost the uniform and dulled the shield far sooner than he had before. At least to Bucky’s memory. 

And wasn’t that a thing? Bucky could remember the previous lifetime he’d had. He could still feel the agony of watching his best friend die. He knew he shouldn’t have walked back into his relationships where he’d left them off, knew he should be six months behind where he was, but he was tired of wasting time. 

His quick acceptance of the world around him shocked Steve, and while he was happy for Bucky, he was more lost than ever. He’d embraced this war against the Accords with arms open to give him a distraction. It had made Bucky’s job — his one goddamned job — much more difficult. Steve was never more of a self sacrificing punk than he’d been in the last few weeks. 

Stark hadn’t made it any more difficult, but he’d not been helping either. Barnes had seen Stark a handful of times in the last two weeks they’d been back stateside. In those fragments of time, Stark had looked gaunt, drawn thin, but determined. If nothing else, Stark before had been larger, more enigmatic and friendly if not as openly easy to read. In the small hours, when Steve looked as tortured as Bucky had ever seen him, he wondered at his own desire for that Tony Stark back. 

Because that Tony Stark had made Steve softer around the edges, more willing to listen to reason, if only after a shouting match. That Tony Stark was hiding behind gilded masks. Bucky was nothing if not persistent, and the Soldier was nothing if not good at tearing things apart.

Of course, he couldn’t exactly walk up to the penthouse, knock on the door and demand access. No, Steve was the more straightforward of the two of them. Bucky had always been the planner. So, Bucky did what he had done best in the time before HYDRA. 

Bucky smiled. 

It all really came down to the con, all things considered. Stark was one of the best in the business of playing this role and that, but Bucky? He’d been doing it longer, had more practice as it were. Voice edged just right and that smile on his lips that was more teeth baring than amusement, he hit the private comm in his ear and waited. 

“What’s up, Klondike?” 

“Steve...won’t listen.” The pause wasn’t planned, wasn’t part of the dialogue he’d written out in his head, the stage direction and the artistic flare. It was real, and it made him hesitate for a moment. The rest of the words belonged to the Soldier, distant but strong. 

Startled, he dropped his hand from the comm unit and blinked sightless out at the cityscape. The wind rocked him back and forth there, for a long while, as he stood on the helipad. 

“Steve’s never been a good listener,” Stark said, from a good pace off of Bucky’s left flank. The Soldier acknowledged the proximity but didn’t flare to the surface in the way he always had before. Storing that little factoid away for later, Barnes turned and acknowledged the billionaire. 

“I’ve known that a lot longer than you’ve been alive.” 

“Vibranium shield. Top of the line — and I mean the top of my line — body armor. The best assassin money can buy as his bodyguard and the eye in the sky, and we’re still not going to keep him safe.” 

“Not if he doesn’t want to be.” 

“What’s your plan?” 

“What’s yours?” 

The two men stood there, on the helicopter pad, neither willing to speak of a world where their lives crumbled around them. Stark had built his monitor droids. He’d made better armor, updated weapons and synthetics and made sure they were the top of the line, unblemished. Barnes was vigilance and strength and will. 

As the sun set over the Manhattan skyline, neither knew if it would be enough. And Clint Barton? Hawkeye? Well. He had a fucking plan, didn’t he?

#

“Frankly, Laur, I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Clint said, shoving the contents of his underwear drawer into the duffle bag on the end of the bed. He fished out a pair of Laura’s light yellow socks—the ones she never wore because they slipped off her heel when she walked but she couldn’t bring herself to throw away—and tossed them onto the bed. They landed with a bounce next to the suitcase he’d put there only a handful of minutes ago. 

“You can’t be serious,” she said, leaning against the bedroom door jam.

Clint couldn’t bring himself to look at her there. The door abutted the corner of the room, a massive, load bearing corner that had been reduced to a spire of charred wood the last he’d seen it. A shudder raced up his spine. The cloying taste of smoke and bile lingered at the back of his throat. 

“Pack your shit,” he said, careful to keep his voice the neutral chill of Hawkeye doing his best Romanova impression. “I can’t do this anymore, and I’m not keeping a farm for the hell of it.” 

“The hell of it?” she asked, voice raised, like she’d just realized he was serious. “The hell of it? You think I moved out here for the hell of it? You think I raised our kids in the middle of nowhere while you were off playing hero for the hell of it?” 

He crossed to the chest of drawers again, taking two pairs of jeans and a half a dozen t-shirts and tossing them in with the underwear and socks. Laura followed him, snatching a folded up pair of dark wash jeans from the bag and swinging them. 

The metal buckle caught him along the eyebrow, sharp and stinging and—good girl, Laur, don’t take shit from anyone, even me — blood welled up in the little knick, sliding down to pool in the hollow below his eye. He pressed two fingers against the cut, knuckling the area so it would swell and bruise and clot. 

“You done?” he asked. When another blow didn’t come, he shoved the suitcase and turned back to the drawer.

Laura’s things, light and airy summer dresses, tank tops and jeans, winter sweaters, denim cut-offs, and his favorite pair of leather pants he’d first seen her in half a lifetime ago. 

They packed in silence, the last of his things going into the duffel before he stripped the room of hers with militant efficiency. The family photos went into a box, and Laura was quiet as she hauled them to the hatchback station wagon parked in front of the barn. The kids laughed and danced around them, excited for the prospect of a sudden adventure. 

The baby didn’t stop crying, not as they put him in his carseat or buckled the others into the back. Not as Laura turned toward him, her bright, intelligent eyes assessing and looking for something behind his sudden reappearance and demand they leave, they split. Finding nothing there, she climbed into the driver’s seat, did up her buckle, and left him.

Her eyes never strayed back to where he stood by the barn. The baby, he was sure, was still screaming. 

Half an hour later, his duffle was tossed into the back of a rusted out pick-up truck. He sat in the back with it, propped up against it, as he drank his way through a fifth of cheap, grocery store vodka. 

Natasha found him the next morning, sitting in the bathtub.


	6. Chapter Six

General Thaddeus Ross chewed on an unlit cigar, tongue seeking out what little of the tobacco taste he could get through the wrapping. His cardiologist and his pulmonologist had been resolute in their threats this time. He would quit smoking or, they told him, he would not be granted clearance on his next wellness check. That, was simply unacceptable.

So, his six cigar a day habit had been replaced with chewing the butt of a sole La Flor Dominicana Andalusian. The flavors were wasted, but it made him feel better, gave him something to do with his hands, something to put his mind at ease, at least about the habitual aspects of his life. He refused to ponder oral fixations.

That peace was about as much as he was going to get, all things considered. Betty hadn’t returned so much as a Christmas card in the last year. The Powers That Be were breathing down his neck about wrapping the entire Accords deal up quickly and quietly—Captain America can’t be a fugitive forever, Ross, fix this. Stark had turned Manhattan Island into his own personally policed zoological experiment where humanity was on display, and there had been photographic evidence of Natasha Romanoff getting off of a plane in Columbus, Ohio. 

The only saving grace was that half of the super hero contingent was locked up beneath two hundred feet of the salt and brine of the Atlantic. 

A sharp knock sounded on his office door, and he glanced over to the intercom on his desk. There was no red blinking light to alert him of a visitor, nothing on the desk calendar to remind him of a meeting. The door flew open half a moment later, and a man in military dress, hair high and tight, and a scowl on his lips, stormed through the door, a folder rolled up in hand. It only took Ross a moment to scan the man’s chest, the stars there adding up too high in his mind. 

“Who the hell do you think—”

“General Ross!” Ms. Abrams, his receptionist, came through the door in a flurry of skirts and blonde hair. “General Ross, this is General—”

“General of Armies Lateran,” the man said, and the five stars were bright and fresh and new. 

“The United States hasn’t had a General of Armies—”

“Since Pershing. However, with developments as of 0900 this morning, the President of our United States saw fit to bring some new blood to bear. You, General Ross, are to turn over any and all intelligence you have concerning the fugitives Clint Barton, Wanda Maximov, Samuel Wilson, and Scott Lang. You are to then report to—”

“You’re operating under non-classified data, General…”

“Lateran,” the man said, the look on his face as unimpressed as Ross felt. “And as of this morning, the Raft sank to the bottom of the Atlantic. Divers have been unable to retrieve any bodies, but I’m willing to bet my pension the Avengers weren’t on it when it sank.” 

“What do you mean it sank?” Ross asked, rising from his desk as his voice rose. 

“Urgent notification for you, General Ross,” Ms. Abrams said, ducking around the General of Armies and passing him a memo.

There, in militant typeface and bold block letter, was the memorandum which would change the life of General Thaddeus Ross. 

#

“We are a nation shaken this evening after US military strikes against the island of Manhattan. This is the first documented instance of our military opening fire on its own citizens since the Kent State shooting, and all for because of billionaire and tech genius Tony Stark’s defense of the people with his Peace Keepers.

This news comes on the wake of the biggest military promotion to happen in decades as General James Lateran was promoted to General of Armies. If you’re like me and unaware of the existence of such a military rank, don’t feel bad. The United States has only had two General of Armies in the course of history, and one of those was George Washington, nominated posthumously.

What does this mean for the future of our nation? What does it mean when civilians have to protect other civilians from the military might of the nation? We have Secretary of State—”

The television set cut out, casting MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow into darkness. On the penthouse floor of Stark Tower, Tony sat on a leather sofa, one leg thrown over the other as he stared out the window. The Peace Keepers had responded better than he had hoped. Loss of life had been limited, final total of fifteen with only three of those happening after the Peace Keeper programming had registered a threat. 

The might of the United States military had been driven back with a quick efficiency most of the citizens of Manhattan Island had cheered. The fallout was unwinding in front of his eyes, outside the window and on the television. 

A smile formed on his lips, slow and careful and fond. Captain America would have to make an announcement in a little while, an hour or two at most. Tony would bounce the feed off of a few satellites, make it look like it came from some middle of nowhere backwater where a good little fugitive would hide. 

There were things you could do, when you were the aggressor of open warfare of a country. There were things you could do if you wanted to look like the peaceful party. 

No soldiers had been killed. They’d simply been forced back across the various bridges. Four missiles had been intercepted in the air, not rerouted.

It was time, Tony decided, for the classic Captain America is Disappointed in You ™ discussion. 

An hour later, Steve was sitting in front of a camera, cowl in place, bright blue eyes shining honestly out as he spoke to the people of America, to the people of Manhattan Island. 

“If Mr. Stark has in any way taken you hostage, if you fear for your lives at his hands, please make yourself known. If you haven’t, if you aren’t. If you feel safer with his Peace Keepers on your streets, protecting you from the everyday menace and from the new military mindset, let it be known. Your government has to hear you. If you want your heroes back, your government has to hear you.” 

He paused, took a long steadying breath, and made a decision. Tony could see it in his eyes, in the way he squared his shoulders. 

“I was one of you once, a long time ago. I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to keep its people safe, and the military offered me a way out of my asthma and heart murmur. They played with the life of a young man, and they made him a weapon. They made a figurehead for the American Nation, and now they want to put it in a box, take it out on Christmas to impress the houseguests. I’m not going back in a box.” 

Deft fingers pulled the cowl off of his head, and he stared at the camera, at America, at each and every one of the souls watching. He was good, Tony decided in that moment. 

In his head, Tony had always considered Captain America great. He was the shining man on the hill, great and terrible and untouchable. Maybe, Tony had forced Steve Rogers—a good man—into that mold the moment he’d seen him, and maybe, that was why they’d been at war for so long. A good man would fight you. He’d tear you down to build you up. He’d do his best to make the world into what he wanted it to be for others, not for himself. A great man, a terribly great man?

Tony Stark had looked in the mirror. 

People thought he didn’t see himself, didn’t know how great he was. Intelligent and wealthy and philanthropic. Those were words used to describe him. Tony Stark had stood on a ridge in Afghanistan and, with arms outstretched like an avenging angel, had blown the landscape into dust. Tony Stark was a great man who wished he’d taken the time to learn how to be good. 

Good like the genuine eyes of Steve Rogers, sharing an intimate moment with each and every person glued to their television screen. Steve held up a piece of paper, no more and no less than nine by seven, black and white matte finish. 

It was a headshot, one the US military had taken before they’d put the cowl on Steve and ushered him around like a dancing bear. 

“This is Captain America,” Steve said, shaking the cowl uselessly and tossing it out of the camera’s view. “This is just me. I’m just a man the United States government made into a soldier, and I’ve been trying to come to terms with this new world they made me to protect, but looking around, I can’t see it. Can you? Can you see that world in military strikes against a peaceful community? Can you see it as your veterans starve on the streets? As men and women fight for everyday needs while others live so lavishly it would have been an embarrassment to the man who made me?” 

Steve took a long breath, and turned the photograph around, staring down at his own image for a second that stretched into thirty. When he looked back up at the camera, there were tears in his eyes. 

“Do you think those men would be able to look at themselves in the mirror?” 

Tony cut the camera with deft fingers, kept silent as the tears welled and passed and dried. He kept silent as Bucky stalked past him, knelt down in front of Steve and took the photo, careful and sure in what would be his acceptance. Tony squared his jaw, pressed his lips together with his teeth, and left.

It was a low blow, he decided, as he walked down the hallway to the penthouse, sicking Steve Rogers on the world, but it was one he was willing to throw. There was too much in the air, too much open hostility still, and the watery blue eyes of Steve Rogers, disappointed boy from Brooklyn, might go a long way where Captain America couldn’t.

“FRIDAY, contact Christine,” he said, laying the camera down on his desk. “Tell her I have something extra special, just for her if she can get here in the next hour.” 

“May I remind you, Sir, that travel across the city in an hour with the current state of—“

“No need. If she can’t get here in sixty minutes, offer the story to one of the MSNBC folks. They seem pissed enough and liberal enough to fall for Steve’s blue eyes.” 

“Are we orchestrating a sympathetic viewpoint, Sir?” FRIDAY asked, voice a touch too mischievous for an AI, but then, Tony had a flare for making artificial intelligence that was a little too real for most people’s likeing. 

“That we are, baby-girl.” 

“Then might I recommend we obtain permission from Mr. Barnes to use security recorded audio from his currently conversation with Captain Rogers, Sir? I find it most sympathetic, and I don’t have emotions.” 

“Ask, my dear, but don’t bother Daddy anymore.” 

He turned toward a sprawling hologram screen in the corner, brought it to life, and glared down the list of shit he’d yet to accomplish. Pulling up the first one, he set his mind to task.

#

Natasha found Clint drunk in the bottom of the bathtub of the farmhouse. It wasn’t the first place she’d looked when she got back to Stark Tower and heard that Steve had gone through with the Raft Operation ahead of schedule. That didn’t shock her so much. Steve had been driven as of late, almost obsessive in his decisions. 

What shocked her was not finding Clint there. The archer had always checked in after big things, and they hadn’t seen each other in months. Yet, when she returned, he’d left, and all Stark would tell her was that he was taking care of what needed doing. 

Sitting in the bottom of a bathtub in an empty house, passed out drunk, was the last place Natasha thought she’d find him. Dead was far more likely, and yet, as she pushed his pliant, stumbling form into the passenger seat of his pick-up truck, that was exactly as he was. 

“What happened?” she asked a few miles down the road. 

Clint hadn’t so much as moved from where he’d pressed his head against the cool glass. 

“Laur left,” he said on an exhale, resignation warring with pride in his voice. “I made her safe.” 

“We could have brought her in.”

Clint chuckled, low and pained, his breath fogging the passenger side window. Natasha, bless her, understood him. 

“It’s...children shouldn’t grow up in rooms underground.” Her words were definitive, resigned and sure, and he hadn’t for a moment considered that he’d offered his children anything other than protection. He’d offered them rooms below the ground, with filtered air and fluorescent lighting. “It’s not even close to the same, Clint.” 

“Wouldn’t it have been?” he asked. “How long before I started showing Lila or Nathaniel how to shoot a bow? Before Aunt Nat showed them how to defend themselves if someone ever got into the compound? How long before I let my sons and daughter stand sentry or tag along on a mission? How long until I let one of them kill someone?”

“You wouldn’t...you wouldn’t have meant for it to be the same.”

“Now it never will be.” 

Natasha didn’t respond, and Clint decided, that in that moment, he’d never loved anyone as much as he loved Natasha Romanoff. He loved Laura. He loved her with everything good in his heart. He loved his children in the same way. Natasha he loved with everything else, and the world had made Clint Barton a man that was more other than good.

He laughed against the window again, and when Natasha glanced over at him, she laughed too. He laughed until he passed out. 

Natasha drove through the day, taking country back roads and standing silent watch as her best friend lay wounded. She was good at many things; watching the pain of those she cared for was not one of them. She could do this though. She could stand sentinel and kill anything that dared come into striking distance. A frown drew her eyebrows together and the corners of her mouth down.

Something had changed since she’d seen Clint last, something that had shaken him to the core, had darkened the last of the light-hearted Clint Barton she’d seen before. She sighed, reaffirmed her grip on the steering wheel, and turned the truck toward the tower.

No matter the channel, the radio announced militant strikes on Manhattan, what differed were the tones and opinion of the nation. This one thought the government should issue a Zero-Hour, give civilians a chance to make it through checkpoints, and then blow the island to kingdom come. That one wanted Stark to stand down, hand over the protection of the city to the police, but thanks for trying anyway. Still yet another felt the government had been out of line, that Stark had done a far better job — and weren’t instances of violent crime damned near zero since his takeover? 

Then there was the stance that Stark might as well just open up that umbrella of protection to every major city across the globe, and that? That felt a lot like Ultron. Natasha wasn’t so ready to give the defence of the world over to a single anyone, especially Tony Stark who had proven a single minded dedication in the past. The defence of more than a couple dozen city blocks required more than single minded focus, but Stark was damned good at things that you could focus on and accomplish with such vigor. She wasn’t about to ask him to give up defences of the Tower, especially in light of the missiles disarmed over one of the most heavily populated areas of the United States.

It was unsettling, the rapid change of opinion Stark had concerning the Avengers, the Accords, and the world at large. She’d left a man pouring over the wording and terms of the Accords and returned to a man standing guard over nearly two million people like there was no one else to do the job and he’d rather the rest of the world burn before he gave them up.

It was difficult to navigate into New York at all, but Natasha was nothing if not good at her job. Clint still sleeping it off in the passenger seat, she parked the truck at a rest stop, hiked the two miles into town, and stole a little convertible sitting in as a mid-life crisis in front of a sprawling home at the end of a cul-de-sac. 

Clint didn’t say anything as he jumped the door and settled into the passenger seat. Clint, she decided, was just as disconcerting as Stark.

There were roadblocks surrounding New York City. Fake ID was easy to come by, and she and Clint always carried an alias. They were married, newly weds, coming back from a honeymoon in Florida. 

“Times are just a little more tight than I’d like, you know?” Clint asked from behind the wheel of the little Nissan they’d exchanged the convertible for an hour prior. “Work only gave me a four day weekend, and anymore, flights are half a grand. I’d have liked to take her to Hawaii, or maybe one of those islands in the Caribbean. One of the ones where you can lay naked on the beach for days and no one—”

“Honey!” Natasha chidded, wrapping her arms around his elbow and blushing as she stared at the tape deck. “They’ve got a lot going on. I’m sure he’d like to get back to work.” 

The police officer bent over in the window smiled knowingly, nodded to Clint in a masculine show of something that, had she not been playing a role, would have made Natasha jab him in the first rib, and told them to enjoy the rest of their time off before returning to the daily grind.

Clint gave the officer a salute, and they pulled through the roadblock, smiles on their faces, identification cards tossed in the glove compartment. If Natasha pressed a little too firmly on the pressure point in Clint’s hand, that was for her to know.

#

Bucky was guilty. 

The United States was imploding upon itself. The Government declared a state of emergency in Manhattan. Martial Law was put in effect — or attemptedly put in effect. The rest of the free world held its breath, waiting to see on which side the coin would fall. Clint sent his wife off to live god knows where without him. Tony and Pepper were as distant as they’d ever been, and the genius was working himself to an ulcer or a cardiac event — whichever came first. Natasha was sharp enough and observant enough to know something had changed at the core of their group and it was slowly driving her to hypervigilance. Steve hadn’t even been this disillusioned before, in the trenches fighting Nazis or in the alleys fighting bullies. 

And Bucky? Bucky hadn’t been more fucking settled in his life. He’d made peace with the lingering aspects of the Winter Soldier, turned them to use, made them his. Steve was alive and whole and there, and he didn’t seem to mind if Bucky stood too close or lingered in his presence too often. He had a group of people around him he’d die to protect, that would die to protect him. 

HYDRA might have made the Winter Soldier, but Bucky had loved to fight since he was thirteen and discovered his fists were for protecting the people he loved. Sure, they’d made him more efficient, a better killing machine they could point and pull the trigger on, but hadn’t the United States Military done the same? There was certainly a question of will and right and wrong and morality, but shit, Bucky hadn’t exactly wanted to fly across the world and fight Nazis.

To reconcile the very decided bad-touch to his mind, he’d decided that in that HYDRA base, he’d gotten his draft card, and that day on the train, it had come due. He’d reported for duty. He’d done his time. Now was for building himself back up, settling in his roots, and using his fists — both the old and the new — for his own purposes.

At the moment, the purpose was for holding Steve Rogers together as he knelt in front of him. 

“This is what we went to war for, Buck,” Steve said to the black and blue and white marble tile between his feet. “This is what we went to war for?” 

“No, punk. I went to war for the military, for honor and duty and my dad’s pride. You went to war for the little guy who couldn’t.” 

“The little guy doesn’t want us here, Bucky, that’s what the Accords say, that’s what the Senate says, the Congress. Hell, it’s what CNN—”

“You think Joe on the corner gets to talk to CNN?” Bucky asked, giving Steve’s shoulder a shake. “Steve, you can’t give up on people. You can give up on a government, a country, hell, you can give up on the world, but you can’t give up on people.” 

“People gave up on me, Buck. Jesus, people gave up on me in the 30’s.” 

“I didn’t. Hell, I had faith in you before I even remembered who you were, Steve. I broke decades of conditioning because of you. I’m not letting you give up on yourself.” He shook him again, hit a palm to the side of his face with a light tap, and pulled him to his feet. “Let’s hit the gym. You’re getting soft.” 

“I’ll show you soft—”


End file.
